CTM
2021-03-17
Very bad
The Financial Crisis the World Forgot<blockquote>被世界遗忘的金融危机</blockquote>
免责声明：上述内容仅代表发帖人个人观点，不构成本平台的任何投资建议。
分享至
微信
复制链接
精彩评论
我们需要你的真知灼见来填补这片空白
打开APP，发表看法
APP内打开
发表看法
19
4
{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"detailType":1,"isChannel":false,"data":{"magic":2,"id":324186971,"tweetId":"324186971","gmtCreate":1615974622593,"gmtModify":1703495741682,"author":{"id":3569552666872019,"idStr":"3569552666872019","authorId":3569552666872019,"authorIdStr":"3569552666872019","name":"CTM","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/93556a1f21f4b45bb0159f5eba636186","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":11,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":8,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body><p>Very bad</p></body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body><p>Very bad</p></body></html>","text":"Very bad","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":4,"commentSize":19,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/324186971","repostId":1176435771,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1176435771","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1615973979,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1176435771?lang=zh_CN&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-03-17 17:39","market":"us","language":"en","title":"The Financial Crisis the World Forgot<blockquote>被世界遗忘的金融危机</blockquote>","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1176435771","media":"NewYork Times","summary":"The Federal Reserve crossed red lines to rescue markets in March 2020. Is there enough momentum to f","content":"<p> The Federal Reserve crossed red lines to rescue markets in March 2020. Is there enough momentum to fix the weaknesses the episode exposed? By the middle of March 2020 a sense of anxiety pervaded the Federal Reserve. The fast-unfolding coronavirus pandemic was rippling through global markets in dangerous ways.</p><p><blockquote>美联储在2020年3月越过红线救市。有足够的动力来修复这一集暴露的弱点吗？到2020年3月中旬，一种焦虑感弥漫在美联储。快速蔓延的冠状病毒疫情正以危险的方式席卷全球市场。</blockquote></p><p> Trading in Treasurys — the government securities that are considered among the safest assets in the world, and the bedrock of the entire bond market — had become disjointed as panicked investors tried to sell everything they owned to raise cash. Buyers were scarce. The Treasury market had never broken down so badly, even in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.</p><p><blockquote>国债——被认为是世界上最安全的资产之一的政府证券，也是整个债券市场的基石——的交易已经变得脱节，因为惊慌失措的投资者试图出售他们拥有的一切来筹集现金。买家稀少。即使在2008年金融危机最严重的时候，美国国债市场也从未出现过如此严重的崩溃。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed called an emergency meeting on March 15, a Sunday. Lorie Logan, who oversees the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s asset portfolio, summarized the brewing crisis. She and her colleagues dialed into a conference from the fortresslike New York Fed headquarters, unable to travel to Washington given the meeting’s impromptu nature and the spreading virus. Regional bank presidents assembled across America stared back from the monitor. Washington-based governors were arrayed in a socially distanced ring around the Fed Board’s mahogany table.</p><p><blockquote>美联储在3月15日周日召开了紧急会议。负责监管纽约联邦储备银行资产组合的洛里·洛根总结了这场酝酿中的危机。她和她的同事从堡垒般的纽约联储总部拨打了一个会议电话，由于会议的即兴性质和病毒的传播，他们无法前往华盛顿。聚集在美国各地的地区银行行长从监视器上回头看。华盛顿的州长们在美联储董事会的红木桌子周围排成一圈，保持社交距离。</blockquote></p><p> Ms. Logan delivered a blunt assessment: While the Fed had been buying government-backed bonds the week before to soothe the volatile Treasury market, market contacts said it hadn’t been enough. To fix things, the Fed mightneed to buy much more. And fast.</p><p><blockquote>洛根女士给出了一个直言不讳的评估：尽管美联储前一周一直在购买政府支持的债券，以安抚动荡的美国国债市场，但市场联系人表示，这还不够。为了解决问题，美联储可能需要购买更多。而且很快。</blockquote></p><p> Fed officials are an argumentative bunch, and they fiercely debated the other issue before them that day, whether to cut interest rates to near-zero.</p><p><blockquote>美联储官员是一群好争论的人，他们当天激烈地争论着摆在他们面前的另一个问题，是否将利率降至接近零的水平。</blockquote></p><p> But, in a testament to the gravity of the breakdown in the government bond market, there was no dissent about whether the central bank needed to stem what was happening by stepping in as a buyer. That afternoon, the Fedannounced an enormous purchase program, promising to make $500 billion in government bond purchases and to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed debt.</p><p><blockquote>但是，对于央行是否需要作为买家介入来阻止正在发生的事情，没有人对政府债券市场崩溃的严重性有异议，这证明了政府债券市场崩溃的严重性。当天下午，美联储宣布了一项庞大的购买计划，承诺购买5000亿美元的政府债券，并购买2000亿美元的抵押贷款支持债务。</blockquote></p><p> It wasn’t the central bank’s first effort to stop the unfolding disaster, nor would it be the last. But it was a clear signal that the 2020 meltdown echoed the 2008 crisis in seriousness and complexity. Where the housing crisis and ensuing crash took years to unfold, the coronavirus panic had struck in weeks.</p><p><blockquote>这不是央行第一次试图阻止这场灾难的发生，也不会是最后一次。但这是一个明确的信号，表明2020年的崩溃在严重性和复杂性上与2008年的危机相呼应。在住房危机和随之而来的崩盘花了数年时间才显现的地方，冠状病毒恐慌在几周内就袭来了。</blockquote></p><p> As March wore on, each hour incubating a new calamity, policymakers were forced tocross boundaries, break precedentsand make new uses of the U.S. government’s vast powers to save domestic markets, keep cash flowing abroad and prevent a full-blown financial crisis from compounding a public health tragedy.</p><p><blockquote>随着三月的过去，每小时都在酝酿一场新的灾难，政策制定者被迫跨越国界，打破先例，并新利用美国政府的巨大权力来拯救国内市场，保持现金流向海外，并防止全面的金融危机加剧公共卫生悲剧。</blockquote></p><p> The rescue worked, so it is easy to forget the peril America’s investors and businesses faced a year ago. But the systemwide weaknesses that were exposed last March remain, and are now under the microscope of Washington policymakers.</p><p><blockquote>救援奏效了，所以人们很容易忘记一年前美国投资者和企业面临的危险。但去年3月暴露出来的全系统弱点依然存在，现在正受到华盛顿政策制定者的密切关注。</blockquote></p><p> <b>How It Started</b></p><p><blockquote><b>它是如何开始的</b></blockquote></p><p> Financial markets began to wobble on Feb. 21, 2020, when Italian authorities announced localized lockdowns.</p><p><blockquote>2020年2月21日，意大利当局宣布局部封锁，金融市场开始波动。</blockquote></p><p> At first, the sell-off in risky investments was normal — a rational “flight to safety” while the global economic outlook was rapidly darkening. Stocks plummeted, demand for many corporate bonds disappeared, and people poured into super-secure investments, like U.S. Treasury bonds.</p><p><blockquote>起初，风险投资的抛售是正常的——在全球经济前景迅速黯淡的情况下，这是一种理性的“避险”。股市暴跌，对许多公司债券的需求消失，人们涌入超级安全的投资，比如美国国债。</blockquote></p><p> On March 3, as market jitters intensified, the Fedcut interest ratesto about 1 percent — its first emergency move since the 2008 financial crisis. Some analysts chidedthe Fed for overreacting, and others asked an obvious question: What could the Fed realistically do in the face of a public health threat?</p><p><blockquote>3月3日，随着市场紧张情绪加剧，美联储将利率降至1%左右，这是自2008年金融危机以来的首次紧急举措。一些分析师指责美联储反应过度，而另一些分析师则提出了一个显而易见的问题：面对公共健康威胁，美联储实际上能做些什么？</blockquote></p><p> “We do recognize that a rate cut will not reduce the rate of infection, it won’t fix a broken supply chain,” Chair Jerome H. Powell said at a news conference, explaining that the Fed was doing what it could to keep credit cheap and available.</p><p><blockquote>主席杰罗姆·H·鲍威尔(Jerome H.Powell)在新闻发布会上表示：“我们确实认识到，降息不会降低感染率，也不会修复断裂的供应链。”他解释说，美联储正在尽其所能保持信贷便宜且可用。</blockquote></p><p> But the health disaster was quickly metastasizing into a market crisis.</p><p><blockquote>但这场健康灾难很快演变成了一场市场危机。</blockquote></p><p> Lockdowns in Italy deepened during the second week of March, and oil prices plummeted as a price war raged, sending tremors across stock, currency and commodity markets. Then, something weird started to happen: Instead of snapping up Treasury bonds, arguably the world’s safest investment, investors began trying to sell them.</p><p><blockquote>意大利的封锁在3月的第二周加深，随着价格战的激烈，油价暴跌，股市、货币和大宗商品市场都发生了震动。然后，奇怪的事情开始发生：投资者没有抢购可以说是世界上最安全的投资的国债，而是开始试图出售它们。</blockquote></p><p> The yield on 10-year Treasury debt — which usually drops when investors seek safe harbor — started to rise on March 10, suggesting investors didn’t want safe assets. They wanted cold, hard cash, and they were trying to sell anything and everything to get it.</p><p><blockquote>10年期国债收益率（通常在投资者寻求安全港时会下降）于3月10日开始上升，表明投资者不想要安全资产。他们想要冰冷的现金，他们试图卖掉任何东西来得到它。</blockquote></p><p> <b>How It Worsened</b></p><p><blockquote><b>病情是如何恶化的</b></blockquote></p><p> Religion works through churches. Democracy through congresses and parliaments. Capitalism is an idea made real through a series of relationships between debtors and creditors, risk and reward. And by last March 11, those equations were no longer adding up.</p><p><blockquote>宗教通过教堂发挥作用。通过国会和议会实现民主。资本主义是一种通过债务人和债权人、风险和回报之间的一系列关系而实现的理念。到去年3月11日，这些方程式不再相加。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> That was the day the World Health Organizationofficially declaredthe virus outbreak a pandemic, and the morning on which it was becoming clear that a sell-off had spiraled into a panic.</p><p><blockquote>那一天，世界卫生组织正式宣布该病毒爆发为大流行，而那天早上，抛售显然已升级为恐慌。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed began to roll out measure after measure in a bid to soothe conditions, first offeringhuge temporary infusions of cashto banks, thenaccelerating plansto buy Treasury bonds as that market swung out of whack.</p><p><blockquote>美联储开始推出一项又一项措施来缓解局势，首先向银行提供巨额临时现金注入，然后在市场出现异常时加快购买国债的计划。</blockquote></p><p> But by Friday, March 13, government bond markets were just one of many problems.</p><p><blockquote>但到了3月13日星期五，政府债券市场只是众多问题之一。</blockquote></p><p> Investors had been pulling their cash from prime money market mutual funds, where they park it to earn a slightly higher return, for days. But those outflows began to accelerate, prompting the funds themselves to pull back sharply from short-term corporate debt markets as they raced to return money to investors. Banks that serve as market conduits were less willing than usual to buy and hold new securities, even just temporarily. That made it harder to sell everything, be it a company bond or Treasury debt.</p><p><blockquote>几天来，投资者一直在从优质货币市场共同基金中提取现金，并将其存放在那里以赚取略高的回报。但这些资金外流开始加速，促使这些基金本身在竞相向投资者返还资金时大幅撤出短期公司债务市场。作为市场渠道的银行不太愿意购买和持有新证券，即使只是暂时购买和持有。这使得出售所有东西变得更加困难，无论是公司债券还是国债。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed’s announcement after its March 15 emergency meeting — that it would slash rates and buy bonds in the most critical markets — was an attempt to get things under control.</p><p><blockquote>美联储在3月15日紧急会议后宣布，将在最关键的市场大幅降息并购买债券，这是试图控制局势。</blockquote></p><p> But Mr. Powell worried that the fix would fall short as short- and long-term debt of all kinds became hard to sell. He approached Andreas Lehnert, director of the Fed’s financial stability division, in the Washington boardroom after the meeting and asked him to prepare emergency lending programs, which the central bank had used in 2008 to serve as a support system to unraveling markets.</p><p><blockquote>但鲍威尔担心，随着各种短期和长期债务变得难以出售，修复方案将无法实现。会后，他在华盛顿会议室找到美联储金融稳定部门主任安德烈亚斯·莱纳特(Andreas Lehnert)，要求他准备紧急贷款计划，美联储在2008年曾使用该计划作为崩溃市场的支持系统。</blockquote></p><p> Mr. Lehnert went straight to a musty office, where he communicated with Fed technicians, economists and lawyers via instant messenger and video chats — in-person meetings were already restricted — and worked late into the night to get the paperwork ready.</p><p><blockquote>莱纳特先生直接去了一间发霉的办公室，在那里他通过即时通讯和视频聊天（面对面的会议已经受到限制）与美联储技术人员、经济学家和律师进行了交流，并工作到深夜准备文件。</blockquote></p><p> Starting that Tuesday morning, after another day of market carnage, the central bank began to unveil the steady drip of rescue programs Mr. Lehnert and his colleagues had been working on: one to buy upshort-term corporate debtand another to keep funding flowing to key banks. Shortlybefore midnighton Wednesday, March 18, the Fed announced a program to rescue embattled money market funds by offering to effectively take hard-to-sell securities off their hands.</p><p><blockquote>从周二早上开始，在又一天的市场大屠杀之后，央行开始推出莱纳特先生和他的同事们一直在努力的稳定的救援计划：一个是购买短期公司债务，另一个是保持资金流向主要银行。3月18日星期三午夜前不久，美联储宣布了一项拯救陷入困境的货币市场基金的计划，提出有效地将难以出售的证券从它们手中夺走。</blockquote></p><p> But by the end of that week, everything was a mess.Foreign central banks and corporations were offloading U.S. debt, partly to raise dollars companies needed to pay interest and other bills; hedge funds werenixing a highly leveraged tradethat had broken down as the market went haywire, dumping Treasurys into the choked market.Corporate bondandcommercial real estate debt marketslooked dicey as companies faced credit rating downgrades and as hotels and malls saw business prospects tank.</p><p><blockquote>但到了那个周末，一切都一团糟。外国央行和企业正在抛售美国债务，部分原因是为了筹集企业支付利息和其他账单所需的美元；对冲基金正在取消随着市场失控而崩溃的高杠杆交易，将美国国债倾销到陷入困境的市场中。由于公司面临信用评级下调以及酒店和购物中心业务前景低迷，公司债券和商业房地产债务市场看起来充满风险。</blockquote></p><p> The world’s most powerful central bank was throwing solutions at the markets as rapidly as it could, and it wasn’t enough.</p><p><blockquote>世界上最强大的央行正在以最快的速度向市场抛出解决方案，但这还不够。</blockquote></p><p> <b>How They Fixed It</b></p><p><blockquote><b>他们是怎么修好的</b></blockquote></p><p> The next weekend, March 21 and 22, was a frenzy. Officials dialed into calls from home, completing still-secret program outlines and negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s team to establish a layer of insurance to protect the efforts against credit losses. After a tormented 48-hour hustle, the Fed sent out a mammoth news release on Monday morning.</p><p><blockquote>接下来的周末，3月21日和22日，是一场狂热。官员们从家里拨通了评级的电话，完成了仍然保密的计划大纲，并与财政部长姆努钦的团队进行了谈判，以建立一层保险来保护这些努力免受信贷损失。经过48小时的痛苦忙碌后，美联储于周一上午发布了一份庞大的新闻稿。</blockquote></p><p> Headlineshit newswiresat 8 a.m., well before American markets opened. The Fed promised tobuy an unlimited amountof Treasury debt and to purchase commercial mortgage-backed securities — efforts to save the most central markets.</p><p><blockquote>头条新闻周六上午8点，远在美国市场开盘之前。美联储承诺购买无限量的国债和商业抵押贷款支持证券——这是为了拯救最核心的市场。</blockquote></p><p> The announcement also pushed the central bank into uncharted territory. The Fed was established in 1913 toserve as a lender of last resortto troubled banks. On March 23, it pledged to funnel help far beyond that financial core. The Fed said it would buy corporate debt and help to get loans to midsize businesses for the first time ever.</p><p><blockquote>这一声明也将央行推向了未知的领域。美联储成立于1913年，作为陷入困境的银行的最后贷款人。3月23日，它承诺提供远远超出财务核心的帮助。美联储表示，将首次购买企业债务并帮助中型企业获得贷款。</blockquote></p><p> It finally worked. The dash for cash turned around starting that day.</p><p><blockquote>终于奏效了。从那天开始，现金热潮出现了转机。</blockquote></p><p> The March 23 efforts took an approach that Mr. Lehnert referred to internally as “covering the waterfront.” Fed economists had discerned which capital marketswere tied to huge numbers of jobsand made sure that every one of them had a Fed support program.</p><p><blockquote>3月23日的努力采取了莱纳特先生在内部称之为“覆盖海滨”的方法。美联储经济学家已经辨别出哪些资本市场与大量就业岗位相关，并确保每个资本市场都有美联储的支持计划。</blockquote></p><p> On April 9, officials put final pieces of the strategy into play. Backed by a huge pot of insurance money from a rescue package just passed by Congress — lawmakers had handed the Treasury up to$454 billion— they announced that they would expand already-announced efforts and set up another to help funnel credit to states and big cities.</p><p><blockquote>4月9日，官员们实施了该战略的最后部分。在国会刚刚通过的救助计划中获得的巨额保险金（立法者向财政部提供了高达4540亿美元的资金）的支持下，他们宣布将扩大已经宣布的努力，并建立另一个计划来帮助向各州和大城市输送信贷。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed’s 2008 rescue effort had been widely criticized as a bank bailout. The 2020 redux was to rescue everything.</p><p><blockquote>美联储2008年的救助行动被广泛批评为银行救助。2020年的redux是为了拯救一切。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> The Fed, along with the Treasury, most likely saved the nation from a crippling financial crisis that would have made it harder for businesses to survive, rebound and rehire, intensifying the economic damage the coronavirus went on to inflict. Many of the programs have since ended or are scheduled to do so, and markets are functioning fine.</p><p><blockquote>美联储和财政部很可能将美国从一场严重的金融危机中拯救出来，这场危机将使企业更难生存、反弹和重新雇用，加剧冠状病毒继续造成的经济损害。许多项目已经结束或计划结束，市场运行良好。</blockquote></p><p> But there’s no guarantee that the calm will prove permanent.</p><p><blockquote>但是不能保证这种平静会是永久的。</blockquote></p><p> “The financial system remains vulnerable” to a repeat of last March’s sweeping disaster as “the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil are still in place,” the Financial Stability Board, a global oversight body, wrote in a meltdownpost-mortem.</p><p><blockquote>全球监督机构金融稳定委员会（Financial Stability Board）在一份meltdownpost-mortem中写道，“金融体系仍然容易”重演去年3月的全面灾难，因为“导致动荡的潜在结构和机制仍然存在”。</blockquote></p><p> <b>What Comes Next</b></p><p><blockquote><b>接下来会发生什么</b></blockquote></p><p> The question policymakers and lawmakers are now grappling with is how to fix those vulnerabilities, which could portend problems for the Treasury market and money market funds if investors get seriously spooked again.</p><p><blockquote>政策制定者和立法者现在正在努力解决的问题是如何修复这些漏洞，如果投资者再次受到严重惊吓，这可能预示着国债市场和货币市场基金将出现问题。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed’s rescue ramps up the urgency to safeguard the system. Central bankers set a precedent by saving previously untouched markets, raising the possibility that investors will take risks, assuming the central bank will always step in if things get bad enough.</p><p><blockquote>美联储的救助增加了保护该体系的紧迫性。央行行长们开创了一个先例，拯救了以前未触及的市场，增加了投资者承担风险的可能性，假设如果情况变得足够糟糕，央行总是会介入。</blockquote></p><p> There’s some bipartisan appetite for reform: Trump-era regulators began a review of money markets, and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has said she will focus on financial oversight. But change won’t be easy. Protests in the street helped to galvanize financial reform after 2008. There is little popular outrage over the March 2020 meltdown, both because it was set off by a health crisis — not bad banker behavior — and because it was resolved quickly.</p><p><blockquote>两党都有一些改革兴趣：特朗普时代的监管机构开始对货币市场进行审查，财政部长珍妮特·L·耶伦表示，她将重点关注金融监管。但是改变并不容易。街头抗议有助于刺激2008年后的金融改革。人们对2020年3月的崩溃几乎没有感到愤怒，这既是因为它是由健康危机引发的——而不是不良银行家行为——也因为它很快得到了解决。</blockquote></p><p> Industry playersare already mobilizing a lobbying effort, and they may find allies in resisting regulation, including among lawmakers.</p><p><blockquote>行业参与者已经在动员游说努力，他们可能会找到抵制监管的盟友，包括立法者。</blockquote></p><p> “I would point out that money market funds have been remarkably stable and successful,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said during aJan. 19 hearing.</p><p><blockquote>“我想指出的是，货币市场基金一直非常稳定和成功，”宾夕法尼亚州共和党参议员帕特里克·J·图米(Patrick J.Toomey)在aJan期间表示。19听证会。</blockquote></p><p></p>","source":"lsy1605590967916","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>The Financial Crisis the World Forgot<blockquote>被世界遗忘的金融危机</blockquote></title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThe Financial Crisis the World Forgot<blockquote>被世界遗忘的金融危机</blockquote>\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">NewYork Times</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-03-17 17:39</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p> The Federal Reserve crossed red lines to rescue markets in March 2020. Is there enough momentum to fix the weaknesses the episode exposed? By the middle of March 2020 a sense of anxiety pervaded the Federal Reserve. The fast-unfolding coronavirus pandemic was rippling through global markets in dangerous ways.</p><p><blockquote>美联储在2020年3月越过红线救市。有足够的动力来修复这一集暴露的弱点吗？到2020年3月中旬，一种焦虑感弥漫在美联储。快速蔓延的冠状病毒疫情正以危险的方式席卷全球市场。</blockquote></p><p> Trading in Treasurys — the government securities that are considered among the safest assets in the world, and the bedrock of the entire bond market — had become disjointed as panicked investors tried to sell everything they owned to raise cash. Buyers were scarce. The Treasury market had never broken down so badly, even in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.</p><p><blockquote>国债——被认为是世界上最安全的资产之一的政府证券，也是整个债券市场的基石——的交易已经变得脱节，因为惊慌失措的投资者试图出售他们拥有的一切来筹集现金。买家稀少。即使在2008年金融危机最严重的时候，美国国债市场也从未出现过如此严重的崩溃。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed called an emergency meeting on March 15, a Sunday. Lorie Logan, who oversees the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s asset portfolio, summarized the brewing crisis. She and her colleagues dialed into a conference from the fortresslike New York Fed headquarters, unable to travel to Washington given the meeting’s impromptu nature and the spreading virus. Regional bank presidents assembled across America stared back from the monitor. Washington-based governors were arrayed in a socially distanced ring around the Fed Board’s mahogany table.</p><p><blockquote>美联储在3月15日周日召开了紧急会议。负责监管纽约联邦储备银行资产组合的洛里·洛根总结了这场酝酿中的危机。她和她的同事从堡垒般的纽约联储总部拨打了一个会议电话，由于会议的即兴性质和病毒的传播，他们无法前往华盛顿。聚集在美国各地的地区银行行长从监视器上回头看。华盛顿的州长们在美联储董事会的红木桌子周围排成一圈，保持社交距离。</blockquote></p><p> Ms. Logan delivered a blunt assessment: While the Fed had been buying government-backed bonds the week before to soothe the volatile Treasury market, market contacts said it hadn’t been enough. To fix things, the Fed mightneed to buy much more. And fast.</p><p><blockquote>洛根女士给出了一个直言不讳的评估：尽管美联储前一周一直在购买政府支持的债券，以安抚动荡的美国国债市场，但市场联系人表示，这还不够。为了解决问题，美联储可能需要购买更多。而且很快。</blockquote></p><p> Fed officials are an argumentative bunch, and they fiercely debated the other issue before them that day, whether to cut interest rates to near-zero.</p><p><blockquote>美联储官员是一群好争论的人，他们当天激烈地争论着摆在他们面前的另一个问题，是否将利率降至接近零的水平。</blockquote></p><p> But, in a testament to the gravity of the breakdown in the government bond market, there was no dissent about whether the central bank needed to stem what was happening by stepping in as a buyer. That afternoon, the Fedannounced an enormous purchase program, promising to make $500 billion in government bond purchases and to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed debt.</p><p><blockquote>但是，对于央行是否需要作为买家介入来阻止正在发生的事情，没有人对政府债券市场崩溃的严重性有异议，这证明了政府债券市场崩溃的严重性。当天下午，美联储宣布了一项庞大的购买计划，承诺购买5000亿美元的政府债券，并购买2000亿美元的抵押贷款支持债务。</blockquote></p><p> It wasn’t the central bank’s first effort to stop the unfolding disaster, nor would it be the last. But it was a clear signal that the 2020 meltdown echoed the 2008 crisis in seriousness and complexity. Where the housing crisis and ensuing crash took years to unfold, the coronavirus panic had struck in weeks.</p><p><blockquote>这不是央行第一次试图阻止这场灾难的发生，也不会是最后一次。但这是一个明确的信号，表明2020年的崩溃在严重性和复杂性上与2008年的危机相呼应。在住房危机和随之而来的崩盘花了数年时间才显现的地方，冠状病毒恐慌在几周内就袭来了。</blockquote></p><p> As March wore on, each hour incubating a new calamity, policymakers were forced tocross boundaries, break precedentsand make new uses of the U.S. government’s vast powers to save domestic markets, keep cash flowing abroad and prevent a full-blown financial crisis from compounding a public health tragedy.</p><p><blockquote>随着三月的过去，每小时都在酝酿一场新的灾难，政策制定者被迫跨越国界，打破先例，并新利用美国政府的巨大权力来拯救国内市场，保持现金流向海外，并防止全面的金融危机加剧公共卫生悲剧。</blockquote></p><p> The rescue worked, so it is easy to forget the peril America’s investors and businesses faced a year ago. But the systemwide weaknesses that were exposed last March remain, and are now under the microscope of Washington policymakers.</p><p><blockquote>救援奏效了，所以人们很容易忘记一年前美国投资者和企业面临的危险。但去年3月暴露出来的全系统弱点依然存在，现在正受到华盛顿政策制定者的密切关注。</blockquote></p><p> <b>How It Started</b></p><p><blockquote><b>它是如何开始的</b></blockquote></p><p> Financial markets began to wobble on Feb. 21, 2020, when Italian authorities announced localized lockdowns.</p><p><blockquote>2020年2月21日，意大利当局宣布局部封锁，金融市场开始波动。</blockquote></p><p> At first, the sell-off in risky investments was normal — a rational “flight to safety” while the global economic outlook was rapidly darkening. Stocks plummeted, demand for many corporate bonds disappeared, and people poured into super-secure investments, like U.S. Treasury bonds.</p><p><blockquote>起初，风险投资的抛售是正常的——在全球经济前景迅速黯淡的情况下，这是一种理性的“避险”。股市暴跌，对许多公司债券的需求消失，人们涌入超级安全的投资，比如美国国债。</blockquote></p><p> On March 3, as market jitters intensified, the Fedcut interest ratesto about 1 percent — its first emergency move since the 2008 financial crisis. Some analysts chidedthe Fed for overreacting, and others asked an obvious question: What could the Fed realistically do in the face of a public health threat?</p><p><blockquote>3月3日，随着市场紧张情绪加剧，美联储将利率降至1%左右，这是自2008年金融危机以来的首次紧急举措。一些分析师指责美联储反应过度，而另一些分析师则提出了一个显而易见的问题：面对公共健康威胁，美联储实际上能做些什么？</blockquote></p><p> “We do recognize that a rate cut will not reduce the rate of infection, it won’t fix a broken supply chain,” Chair Jerome H. Powell said at a news conference, explaining that the Fed was doing what it could to keep credit cheap and available.</p><p><blockquote>主席杰罗姆·H·鲍威尔(Jerome H.Powell)在新闻发布会上表示：“我们确实认识到，降息不会降低感染率，也不会修复断裂的供应链。”他解释说，美联储正在尽其所能保持信贷便宜且可用。</blockquote></p><p> But the health disaster was quickly metastasizing into a market crisis.</p><p><blockquote>但这场健康灾难很快演变成了一场市场危机。</blockquote></p><p> Lockdowns in Italy deepened during the second week of March, and oil prices plummeted as a price war raged, sending tremors across stock, currency and commodity markets. Then, something weird started to happen: Instead of snapping up Treasury bonds, arguably the world’s safest investment, investors began trying to sell them.</p><p><blockquote>意大利的封锁在3月的第二周加深，随着价格战的激烈，油价暴跌，股市、货币和大宗商品市场都发生了震动。然后，奇怪的事情开始发生：投资者没有抢购可以说是世界上最安全的投资的国债，而是开始试图出售它们。</blockquote></p><p> The yield on 10-year Treasury debt — which usually drops when investors seek safe harbor — started to rise on March 10, suggesting investors didn’t want safe assets. They wanted cold, hard cash, and they were trying to sell anything and everything to get it.</p><p><blockquote>10年期国债收益率（通常在投资者寻求安全港时会下降）于3月10日开始上升，表明投资者不想要安全资产。他们想要冰冷的现金，他们试图卖掉任何东西来得到它。</blockquote></p><p> <b>How It Worsened</b></p><p><blockquote><b>病情是如何恶化的</b></blockquote></p><p> Religion works through churches. Democracy through congresses and parliaments. Capitalism is an idea made real through a series of relationships between debtors and creditors, risk and reward. And by last March 11, those equations were no longer adding up.</p><p><blockquote>宗教通过教堂发挥作用。通过国会和议会实现民主。资本主义是一种通过债务人和债权人、风险和回报之间的一系列关系而实现的理念。到去年3月11日，这些方程式不再相加。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> That was the day the World Health Organizationofficially declaredthe virus outbreak a pandemic, and the morning on which it was becoming clear that a sell-off had spiraled into a panic.</p><p><blockquote>那一天，世界卫生组织正式宣布该病毒爆发为大流行，而那天早上，抛售显然已升级为恐慌。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed began to roll out measure after measure in a bid to soothe conditions, first offeringhuge temporary infusions of cashto banks, thenaccelerating plansto buy Treasury bonds as that market swung out of whack.</p><p><blockquote>美联储开始推出一项又一项措施来缓解局势，首先向银行提供巨额临时现金注入，然后在市场出现异常时加快购买国债的计划。</blockquote></p><p> But by Friday, March 13, government bond markets were just one of many problems.</p><p><blockquote>但到了3月13日星期五，政府债券市场只是众多问题之一。</blockquote></p><p> Investors had been pulling their cash from prime money market mutual funds, where they park it to earn a slightly higher return, for days. But those outflows began to accelerate, prompting the funds themselves to pull back sharply from short-term corporate debt markets as they raced to return money to investors. Banks that serve as market conduits were less willing than usual to buy and hold new securities, even just temporarily. That made it harder to sell everything, be it a company bond or Treasury debt.</p><p><blockquote>几天来，投资者一直在从优质货币市场共同基金中提取现金，并将其存放在那里以赚取略高的回报。但这些资金外流开始加速，促使这些基金本身在竞相向投资者返还资金时大幅撤出短期公司债务市场。作为市场渠道的银行不太愿意购买和持有新证券，即使只是暂时购买和持有。这使得出售所有东西变得更加困难，无论是公司债券还是国债。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed’s announcement after its March 15 emergency meeting — that it would slash rates and buy bonds in the most critical markets — was an attempt to get things under control.</p><p><blockquote>美联储在3月15日紧急会议后宣布，将在最关键的市场大幅降息并购买债券，这是试图控制局势。</blockquote></p><p> But Mr. Powell worried that the fix would fall short as short- and long-term debt of all kinds became hard to sell. He approached Andreas Lehnert, director of the Fed’s financial stability division, in the Washington boardroom after the meeting and asked him to prepare emergency lending programs, which the central bank had used in 2008 to serve as a support system to unraveling markets.</p><p><blockquote>但鲍威尔担心，随着各种短期和长期债务变得难以出售，修复方案将无法实现。会后，他在华盛顿会议室找到美联储金融稳定部门主任安德烈亚斯·莱纳特(Andreas Lehnert)，要求他准备紧急贷款计划，美联储在2008年曾使用该计划作为崩溃市场的支持系统。</blockquote></p><p> Mr. Lehnert went straight to a musty office, where he communicated with Fed technicians, economists and lawyers via instant messenger and video chats — in-person meetings were already restricted — and worked late into the night to get the paperwork ready.</p><p><blockquote>莱纳特先生直接去了一间发霉的办公室，在那里他通过即时通讯和视频聊天（面对面的会议已经受到限制）与美联储技术人员、经济学家和律师进行了交流，并工作到深夜准备文件。</blockquote></p><p> Starting that Tuesday morning, after another day of market carnage, the central bank began to unveil the steady drip of rescue programs Mr. Lehnert and his colleagues had been working on: one to buy upshort-term corporate debtand another to keep funding flowing to key banks. Shortlybefore midnighton Wednesday, March 18, the Fed announced a program to rescue embattled money market funds by offering to effectively take hard-to-sell securities off their hands.</p><p><blockquote>从周二早上开始，在又一天的市场大屠杀之后，央行开始推出莱纳特先生和他的同事们一直在努力的稳定的救援计划：一个是购买短期公司债务，另一个是保持资金流向主要银行。3月18日星期三午夜前不久，美联储宣布了一项拯救陷入困境的货币市场基金的计划，提出有效地将难以出售的证券从它们手中夺走。</blockquote></p><p> But by the end of that week, everything was a mess.Foreign central banks and corporations were offloading U.S. debt, partly to raise dollars companies needed to pay interest and other bills; hedge funds werenixing a highly leveraged tradethat had broken down as the market went haywire, dumping Treasurys into the choked market.Corporate bondandcommercial real estate debt marketslooked dicey as companies faced credit rating downgrades and as hotels and malls saw business prospects tank.</p><p><blockquote>但到了那个周末，一切都一团糟。外国央行和企业正在抛售美国债务，部分原因是为了筹集企业支付利息和其他账单所需的美元；对冲基金正在取消随着市场失控而崩溃的高杠杆交易，将美国国债倾销到陷入困境的市场中。由于公司面临信用评级下调以及酒店和购物中心业务前景低迷，公司债券和商业房地产债务市场看起来充满风险。</blockquote></p><p> The world’s most powerful central bank was throwing solutions at the markets as rapidly as it could, and it wasn’t enough.</p><p><blockquote>世界上最强大的央行正在以最快的速度向市场抛出解决方案，但这还不够。</blockquote></p><p> <b>How They Fixed It</b></p><p><blockquote><b>他们是怎么修好的</b></blockquote></p><p> The next weekend, March 21 and 22, was a frenzy. Officials dialed into calls from home, completing still-secret program outlines and negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s team to establish a layer of insurance to protect the efforts against credit losses. After a tormented 48-hour hustle, the Fed sent out a mammoth news release on Monday morning.</p><p><blockquote>接下来的周末，3月21日和22日，是一场狂热。官员们从家里拨通了评级的电话，完成了仍然保密的计划大纲，并与财政部长姆努钦的团队进行了谈判，以建立一层保险来保护这些努力免受信贷损失。经过48小时的痛苦忙碌后，美联储于周一上午发布了一份庞大的新闻稿。</blockquote></p><p> Headlineshit newswiresat 8 a.m., well before American markets opened. The Fed promised tobuy an unlimited amountof Treasury debt and to purchase commercial mortgage-backed securities — efforts to save the most central markets.</p><p><blockquote>头条新闻周六上午8点，远在美国市场开盘之前。美联储承诺购买无限量的国债和商业抵押贷款支持证券——这是为了拯救最核心的市场。</blockquote></p><p> The announcement also pushed the central bank into uncharted territory. The Fed was established in 1913 toserve as a lender of last resortto troubled banks. On March 23, it pledged to funnel help far beyond that financial core. The Fed said it would buy corporate debt and help to get loans to midsize businesses for the first time ever.</p><p><blockquote>这一声明也将央行推向了未知的领域。美联储成立于1913年，作为陷入困境的银行的最后贷款人。3月23日，它承诺提供远远超出财务核心的帮助。美联储表示，将首次购买企业债务并帮助中型企业获得贷款。</blockquote></p><p> It finally worked. The dash for cash turned around starting that day.</p><p><blockquote>终于奏效了。从那天开始，现金热潮出现了转机。</blockquote></p><p> The March 23 efforts took an approach that Mr. Lehnert referred to internally as “covering the waterfront.” Fed economists had discerned which capital marketswere tied to huge numbers of jobsand made sure that every one of them had a Fed support program.</p><p><blockquote>3月23日的努力采取了莱纳特先生在内部称之为“覆盖海滨”的方法。美联储经济学家已经辨别出哪些资本市场与大量就业岗位相关，并确保每个资本市场都有美联储的支持计划。</blockquote></p><p> On April 9, officials put final pieces of the strategy into play. Backed by a huge pot of insurance money from a rescue package just passed by Congress — lawmakers had handed the Treasury up to$454 billion— they announced that they would expand already-announced efforts and set up another to help funnel credit to states and big cities.</p><p><blockquote>4月9日，官员们实施了该战略的最后部分。在国会刚刚通过的救助计划中获得的巨额保险金（立法者向财政部提供了高达4540亿美元的资金）的支持下，他们宣布将扩大已经宣布的努力，并建立另一个计划来帮助向各州和大城市输送信贷。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed’s 2008 rescue effort had been widely criticized as a bank bailout. The 2020 redux was to rescue everything.</p><p><blockquote>美联储2008年的救助行动被广泛批评为银行救助。2020年的redux是为了拯救一切。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> The Fed, along with the Treasury, most likely saved the nation from a crippling financial crisis that would have made it harder for businesses to survive, rebound and rehire, intensifying the economic damage the coronavirus went on to inflict. Many of the programs have since ended or are scheduled to do so, and markets are functioning fine.</p><p><blockquote>美联储和财政部很可能将美国从一场严重的金融危机中拯救出来，这场危机将使企业更难生存、反弹和重新雇用，加剧冠状病毒继续造成的经济损害。许多项目已经结束或计划结束，市场运行良好。</blockquote></p><p> But there’s no guarantee that the calm will prove permanent.</p><p><blockquote>但是不能保证这种平静会是永久的。</blockquote></p><p> “The financial system remains vulnerable” to a repeat of last March’s sweeping disaster as “the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil are still in place,” the Financial Stability Board, a global oversight body, wrote in a meltdownpost-mortem.</p><p><blockquote>全球监督机构金融稳定委员会（Financial Stability Board）在一份meltdownpost-mortem中写道，“金融体系仍然容易”重演去年3月的全面灾难，因为“导致动荡的潜在结构和机制仍然存在”。</blockquote></p><p> <b>What Comes Next</b></p><p><blockquote><b>接下来会发生什么</b></blockquote></p><p> The question policymakers and lawmakers are now grappling with is how to fix those vulnerabilities, which could portend problems for the Treasury market and money market funds if investors get seriously spooked again.</p><p><blockquote>政策制定者和立法者现在正在努力解决的问题是如何修复这些漏洞，如果投资者再次受到严重惊吓，这可能预示着国债市场和货币市场基金将出现问题。</blockquote></p><p> The Fed’s rescue ramps up the urgency to safeguard the system. Central bankers set a precedent by saving previously untouched markets, raising the possibility that investors will take risks, assuming the central bank will always step in if things get bad enough.</p><p><blockquote>美联储的救助增加了保护该体系的紧迫性。央行行长们开创了一个先例，拯救了以前未触及的市场，增加了投资者承担风险的可能性，假设如果情况变得足够糟糕，央行总是会介入。</blockquote></p><p> There’s some bipartisan appetite for reform: Trump-era regulators began a review of money markets, and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has said she will focus on financial oversight. But change won’t be easy. Protests in the street helped to galvanize financial reform after 2008. There is little popular outrage over the March 2020 meltdown, both because it was set off by a health crisis — not bad banker behavior — and because it was resolved quickly.</p><p><blockquote>两党都有一些改革兴趣：特朗普时代的监管机构开始对货币市场进行审查，财政部长珍妮特·L·耶伦表示，她将重点关注金融监管。但是改变并不容易。街头抗议有助于刺激2008年后的金融改革。人们对2020年3月的崩溃几乎没有感到愤怒，这既是因为它是由健康危机引发的——而不是不良银行家行为——也因为它很快得到了解决。</blockquote></p><p> Industry playersare already mobilizing a lobbying effort, and they may find allies in resisting regulation, including among lawmakers.</p><p><blockquote>行业参与者已经在动员游说努力，他们可能会找到抵制监管的盟友，包括立法者。</blockquote></p><p> “I would point out that money market funds have been remarkably stable and successful,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said during aJan. 19 hearing.</p><p><blockquote>“我想指出的是，货币市场基金一直非常稳定和成功，”宾夕法尼亚州共和党参议员帕特里克·J·图米(Patrick J.Toomey)在aJan期间表示。19听证会。</blockquote></p><p></p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> 来源：<a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/business/economy/fed-2020-financial-crisis-covid.html\">NewYork Times</a></p>\n<p>为提升您的阅读体验，我们对本页面进行了排版优化</p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{".SPX":"S&P 500 Index",".DJI":"道琼斯",".IXIC":"NASDAQ Composite"},"source_url":"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/business/economy/fed-2020-financial-crisis-covid.html","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1176435771","content_text":"The Federal Reserve crossed red lines to rescue markets in March 2020. Is there enough momentum to fix the weaknesses the episode exposed?\n\nBy the middle of March 2020 a sense of anxiety pervaded the Federal Reserve. The fast-unfolding coronavirus pandemic was rippling through global markets in dangerous ways.\nTrading in Treasurys — the government securities that are considered among the safest assets in the world, and the bedrock of the entire bond market — had become disjointed as panicked investors tried to sell everything they owned to raise cash. Buyers were scarce. The Treasury market had never broken down so badly, even in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.\nThe Fed called an emergency meeting on March 15, a Sunday. Lorie Logan, who oversees the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s asset portfolio, summarized the brewing crisis. She and her colleagues dialed into a conference from the fortresslike New York Fed headquarters, unable to travel to Washington given the meeting’s impromptu nature and the spreading virus. Regional bank presidents assembled across America stared back from the monitor. Washington-based governors were arrayed in a socially distanced ring around the Fed Board’s mahogany table.\nMs. Logan delivered a blunt assessment: While the Fed had been buying government-backed bonds the week before to soothe the volatile Treasury market, market contacts said it hadn’t been enough. To fix things, the Fed mightneed to buy much more. And fast.\nFed officials are an argumentative bunch, and they fiercely debated the other issue before them that day, whether to cut interest rates to near-zero.\nBut, in a testament to the gravity of the breakdown in the government bond market, there was no dissent about whether the central bank needed to stem what was happening by stepping in as a buyer. That afternoon, the Fedannounced an enormous purchase program, promising to make $500 billion in government bond purchases and to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed debt.\nIt wasn’t the central bank’s first effort to stop the unfolding disaster, nor would it be the last. But it was a clear signal that the 2020 meltdown echoed the 2008 crisis in seriousness and complexity. Where the housing crisis and ensuing crash took years to unfold, the coronavirus panic had struck in weeks.\nAs March wore on, each hour incubating a new calamity, policymakers were forced tocross boundaries, break precedentsand make new uses of the U.S. government’s vast powers to save domestic markets, keep cash flowing abroad and prevent a full-blown financial crisis from compounding a public health tragedy.\nThe rescue worked, so it is easy to forget the peril America’s investors and businesses faced a year ago. But the systemwide weaknesses that were exposed last March remain, and are now under the microscope of Washington policymakers.\nHow It Started\nFinancial markets began to wobble on Feb. 21, 2020, when Italian authorities announced localized lockdowns.\nAt first, the sell-off in risky investments was normal — a rational “flight to safety” while the global economic outlook was rapidly darkening. Stocks plummeted, demand for many corporate bonds disappeared, and people poured into super-secure investments, like U.S. Treasury bonds.\nOn March 3, as market jitters intensified, the Fedcut interest ratesto about 1 percent — its first emergency move since the 2008 financial crisis. Some analysts chidedthe Fed for overreacting, and others asked an obvious question: What could the Fed realistically do in the face of a public health threat?\n“We do recognize that a rate cut will not reduce the rate of infection, it won’t fix a broken supply chain,” Chair Jerome H. Powell said at a news conference, explaining that the Fed was doing what it could to keep credit cheap and available.\nBut the health disaster was quickly metastasizing into a market crisis.\nLockdowns in Italy deepened during the second week of March, and oil prices plummeted as a price war raged, sending tremors across stock, currency and commodity markets. Then, something weird started to happen: Instead of snapping up Treasury bonds, arguably the world’s safest investment, investors began trying to sell them.\nThe yield on 10-year Treasury debt — which usually drops when investors seek safe harbor — started to rise on March 10, suggesting investors didn’t want safe assets. They wanted cold, hard cash, and they were trying to sell anything and everything to get it.\nHow It Worsened\nReligion works through churches. Democracy through congresses and parliaments. Capitalism is an idea made real through a series of relationships between debtors and creditors, risk and reward. And by last March 11, those equations were no longer adding up.\nThat was the day the World Health Organizationofficially declaredthe virus outbreak a pandemic, and the morning on which it was becoming clear that a sell-off had spiraled into a panic.\nThe Fed began to roll out measure after measure in a bid to soothe conditions, first offeringhuge temporary infusions of cashto banks, thenaccelerating plansto buy Treasury bonds as that market swung out of whack.\nBut by Friday, March 13, government bond markets were just one of many problems.\nInvestors had been pulling their cash from prime money market mutual funds, where they park it to earn a slightly higher return, for days. But those outflows began to accelerate, prompting the funds themselves to pull back sharply from short-term corporate debt markets as they raced to return money to investors. Banks that serve as market conduits were less willing than usual to buy and hold new securities, even just temporarily. That made it harder to sell everything, be it a company bond or Treasury debt.\nThe Fed’s announcement after its March 15 emergency meeting — that it would slash rates and buy bonds in the most critical markets — was an attempt to get things under control.\nBut Mr. Powell worried that the fix would fall short as short- and long-term debt of all kinds became hard to sell. He approached Andreas Lehnert, director of the Fed’s financial stability division, in the Washington boardroom after the meeting and asked him to prepare emergency lending programs, which the central bank had used in 2008 to serve as a support system to unraveling markets.\nMr. Lehnert went straight to a musty office, where he communicated with Fed technicians, economists and lawyers via instant messenger and video chats — in-person meetings were already restricted — and worked late into the night to get the paperwork ready.\nStarting that Tuesday morning, after another day of market carnage, the central bank began to unveil the steady drip of rescue programs Mr. Lehnert and his colleagues had been working on: one to buy upshort-term corporate debtand another to keep funding flowing to key banks. Shortlybefore midnighton Wednesday, March 18, the Fed announced a program to rescue embattled money market funds by offering to effectively take hard-to-sell securities off their hands.\nBut by the end of that week, everything was a mess.Foreign central banks and corporations were offloading U.S. debt, partly to raise dollars companies needed to pay interest and other bills; hedge funds werenixing a highly leveraged tradethat had broken down as the market went haywire, dumping Treasurys into the choked market.Corporate bondandcommercial real estate debt marketslooked dicey as companies faced credit rating downgrades and as hotels and malls saw business prospects tank.\nThe world’s most powerful central bank was throwing solutions at the markets as rapidly as it could, and it wasn’t enough.\nHow They Fixed It\nThe next weekend, March 21 and 22, was a frenzy. Officials dialed into calls from home, completing still-secret program outlines and negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s team to establish a layer of insurance to protect the efforts against credit losses. After a tormented 48-hour hustle, the Fed sent out a mammoth news release on Monday morning.\nHeadlineshit newswiresat 8 a.m., well before American markets opened. The Fed promised tobuy an unlimited amountof Treasury debt and to purchase commercial mortgage-backed securities — efforts to save the most central markets.\nThe announcement also pushed the central bank into uncharted territory. The Fed was established in 1913 toserve as a lender of last resortto troubled banks. On March 23, it pledged to funnel help far beyond that financial core. The Fed said it would buy corporate debt and help to get loans to midsize businesses for the first time ever.\nIt finally worked. The dash for cash turned around starting that day.\nThe March 23 efforts took an approach that Mr. Lehnert referred to internally as “covering the waterfront.” Fed economists had discerned which capital marketswere tied to huge numbers of jobsand made sure that every one of them had a Fed support program.\nOn April 9, officials put final pieces of the strategy into play. Backed by a huge pot of insurance money from a rescue package just passed by Congress — lawmakers had handed the Treasury up to$454 billion— they announced that they would expand already-announced efforts and set up another to help funnel credit to states and big cities.\nThe Fed’s 2008 rescue effort had been widely criticized as a bank bailout. The 2020 redux was to rescue everything.\nThe Fed, along with the Treasury, most likely saved the nation from a crippling financial crisis that would have made it harder for businesses to survive, rebound and rehire, intensifying the economic damage the coronavirus went on to inflict. Many of the programs have since ended or are scheduled to do so, and markets are functioning fine.\nBut there’s no guarantee that the calm will prove permanent.\n“The financial system remains vulnerable” to a repeat of last March’s sweeping disaster as “the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil are still in place,” the Financial Stability Board, a global oversight body, wrote in a meltdownpost-mortem.\nWhat Comes Next\nThe question policymakers and lawmakers are now grappling with is how to fix those vulnerabilities, which could portend problems for the Treasury market and money market funds if investors get seriously spooked again.\nThe Fed’s rescue ramps up the urgency to safeguard the system. Central bankers set a precedent by saving previously untouched markets, raising the possibility that investors will take risks, assuming the central bank will always step in if things get bad enough.\nThere’s some bipartisan appetite for reform: Trump-era regulators began a review of money markets, and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has said she will focus on financial oversight. But change won’t be easy. Protests in the street helped to galvanize financial reform after 2008. There is little popular outrage over the March 2020 meltdown, both because it was set off by a health crisis — not bad banker behavior — and because it was resolved quickly.\nIndustry playersare already mobilizing a lobbying effort, and they may find allies in resisting regulation, including among lawmakers.\n“I would point out that money market funds have been remarkably stable and successful,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said during aJan. 19 hearing.","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{".SPX":0.9,".IXIC":0.9,".DJI":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":2155,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"EN","currentLanguage":"EN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":7,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ORIG"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"isTiger":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"url":"/m/post/324186971"}
精彩评论